In this fast-changing, increasingly interconnected world, it’s difficult to stay an informed global citizen. To remain on top of things, you need a strategy for swiftly getting up to speed whenever parts of the world you previously knew little about begin making headlines, as Haiti did last year and countries of North Africa have in 2011. I’ve found that one useful strategy, whenever a new setting commands attention, is to come up with the name of someone with a demonstrated ability to write about the locale in an effective, accessible, concise and informed manner–and because life is too short to read boring or inelegant prose, is also an engaging stylist. Then I go online to see if the author has written anything on the topic of the moment. Most recently, this approach led to a morning spent scouring the web for new commentaries by Laila Lalami, a Moroccan writer who I had heard say fascinating things about North Africa at a 2008 public event, and then devouring and learning from smart essays on Tunisia and Egypt she had written for the Guardian and the Nation. In 2010, a similar process led me to a crash course on contemporary Haiti, courtesy of Amy Wilentz, the author of an important 1990 book on that country who went back to it after last year’s earthquake and wrote about the experience for the Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, Time Magazine and the New Yorker.

You can do the things I’ve just described doing from any place in the United States, of course, but there’s something special about turning to Lalami and Wilentz for edification if you happen to be a Californian: each is not just a world-class writer, but also someone who is employed by this state. If you attend UC Riverside, where Lalami teaches in the Creative Writing Department, you can go from reading her essays to signing up for one of her courses.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-wasserstrom/a-california-resource-wor_b_820176.html?ir=College